Skip to main content

Music Monday: When You Go


Is Music Monday a thing? Google tells me it's a twitter thing, but it doesn't appear to be a blog thing. But I'm making it a blog thing, or my blog thing, or my blog thing today.

I don't remember exactly how I discovered singer/ songwriter/ geek lord Jonathan Coulton. But I've been a fan of his for several years now. He's a internet rock star, the first internet rock star in fact, and perhaps the most successful. In addition to selling his songs on his blog and performing in venues around the country he releases all of his music under a Creative Commons license, which means that so long as you're not trying to make a profit you're welcome to cover his music, make videos of his music, or record his live shows. It's a part of what makes him awesome, and it means that you can spend a lot of time on YouTube going from song to song getting a feel for his music. He writes a lot of silly geeky songs and a lot of songs that resonate with the silly geek I was, and am.

“When You Go” is a song about loss, and on his blog JoCo says not necessarily romantic. I knew that already because I hear all kinds of loss in the lyrics, and romantic loss is the least meaningful of them.
While my life in flux everything gets stirred up, including some losses of my own, so this song, which always gets me, is especially poignant for me right now.

(And no, none of my current life changes involve romantic loss. )

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Butter(less) Chickpeas

On Monday morning I got a call from a client, warning that my services would be needed soon. The threat of labor makes me pretty efficient. I filled and ran the dishwasher, cleaned the sink, took the boys grocery shopping, got the groceries put away, fed the boys lunch, emptied the dishwasher, made snack and dinner for the boys, filled the dogs' water, cleaned the dog' ears, and put the flowers in the vase. I spent the rest of Monday at the birth, watching a skilled nurse-midwife facilitate the VBAC my client wanted despite circumstances that might have sent some providers running for the operating room. It was a great birth, the baby was perfect and I'm glad I was there to witness it. But it meant that I didn't get to bed until 2:00 in the morning. When I say that I am a morning person, I do not mean 2:00 in the morning. A mere five hours later the sun was up and my children were up and my husband was getting ready to leave for work. I had a follow-up scheduled for...

Making Christmas

Years ago, when my parents married, my mother asked my father what he would like her to make for Christmas. He asked for Julekake, a Scandinavian Christmas bread. It was common in the bakeries in my father's childhood Chicago, but it was more difficult to find in the small Army towns where my father was posted, so my mother found a recipe, and baked her own. We ate it with eggs or bacon or sausage every Christmas breakfast of my childhood. My mother baked simple round loaves studded with raisins and candied cherries. When I grew up I swapped out dried cherries for the candied ones. I baked it in the oven of my boyfriend's apartment before I went to share Christmas with his family, inhaled the scent of them to make it Christmas when the traditions around me were not my own. I've discovered that the fruit is not mandatory, though I'd never leave it out. A braid is traditional, and I'll make a braided loaf when I have time, though for gift giving I ...

Brown-Butter Buttercream Birthday Cake

Brown-Butter Swiss Meringue Buttercream I have come here today to confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned.  In full knowledge of the importance of birthday cakes , I did willfully try to get away with making a pound cake for a friend's birthday because I didn't want to be bothered with frosting a layer cake. My feet were only set back on the path to righteousness by a stern rebuke from my friend's husband. (Okay, not a stern rebuke, but "statement of my friend's mild preference" seems sort of anti-climactic, doesn't it?) And, as it turned out, a different friend of mine had spurred a thread about brown butter over on Facebook and I had filed away the phrase "brown-butter buttercream" for future use. So I decided that if I was going to frost a cake I was going to do it with style. The first step is to brown the butter, which is a simple matter so long as you're willing to hang around the kitc...